


Hope is Not for the Wise

by NervousAsexual



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Anxiety, Coping, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Existential Crisis, Implied/Referenced Suicide, PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, and wound up being about climate change to some degree, me? projecting onto Nick? it's more likely than you might think, post-Dangerous Minds, this may or may not be a metaphor for my anxiety that went spinning out of control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 17:03:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18782446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Nick Valentine and the ghosts he carries with him watch the end of the world draw nearer.





	Hope is Not for the Wise

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the work of sillyandquiteawkward over on tumblr, specifically [this post here](https://sillyandquiteawkward.tumblr.com/post/152630938571/cant-concentrate). As you can see, it went completely off the rails.
> 
> Apparently this is my 100th work on AO3, not counting some sad orphaned works I tossed into the void a few years ago.

There was no way to know for sure because the records were long gone, but he suspected Nick Valentine, the one who gave him his name and his voice and the memories that weren't actually his, was long gone. The more he thought about it the more convinced he became that Nick Valentine didn't live to see the end of the world: that he saw the writing on the wall--his own personal, self-destructive superpower--and rather than face the prospect of despair he chose death. 

He thought this because he still felt it sometimes. He could feel  tears in eyes that couldn't cry and the ache of bitten nails on the hand that hadn't felt anything in twenty years. The world ended two hundred years ago but he was afraid of watching it burn.

He tried to tell himself that it's just a feeling, that it's just what was left over from a man who had his own problems, his own life, his own anxieties. But he couldn't help but look at the Brotherhood of Steel and the Institute and the way everything was escalating and see it through the eyes of someone who'd seen all this before.

He wanted to just bury himself in the work. He wanted to run down spouses who skipped town, solve thefts, rescue cats stuck in trees. But Nora was the center of the Commonwealth in that moment. There was no escaping her pull.

She played all sides against the middle for the moment, but he was afraid of where she was going next. The Institute--her son--had a stake in her that the Brotherhood didn't. He knew, both in the shaky, anxious part of him that had no proof and in the part of him that could look at her without judgement, that she would side with her family. He couldn't bring himself to blame her. What was the alternative? If she chose the Brotherhood he was just as doomed. If she refused to make the choice, then the two factions would tear the Commonwealth apart like she'd never been at all.

But all that was purely academic. He knew she would side with her son. Why shouldn't she? After so long searching she would never give him up, no matter what he'd done in the meanwhile.

He should have told her. He should have given her a chance to explain. But he didn't. He never questioned a damn thing she told him. She asked him to do things sometimes and he knew it was because she trusted him, but as much as he hated raiders, he can't stand to think about what happened to that synth at Libertalia once he was sent back to the Institute.

It was real bad afterward. He went back to the agency, tried to focus on a new case, go over some old files, clean his gun, anything. But as he oiled the cylinder he heard her voice again, calmly reciting the recall code that brought that synth to his knees, and if he'd had a stomach he would have been sick. From the part of his mind that always evaded partitioning the man with the scar stepped out behind him and whispered, "Hard to say no to her, isn't it?"

"Didn't ask, Kellogg." He was shaking. He could feel himself shaking, but he wasn't. It was just a feeling.

"She's got your number now. You're not gonna protest, so she might as well walk all over you."

He sank down at his desk and pushed the gun out of reach. "Shut up."

"You know I'm right." Kellogg's hands touched his shoulders lightly, and he felt the hair he didn't have on his arms and the back of his neck stand up. "You'd do anything to have people like you. If she asked you to burn the Railroad to the ground you'd do it."

He was lying. Every time he opened his mouth Kellogg lied. Seemed like it was happening more and more often all the time, and it only made him feel worse. He tried to focus on something, anything, else. A file folder lay on the corner of the desk--he didn't know what it was for but it didn't matter. As he reached out for it Kellogg's hands pressed down on his shoulders and he froze with the memory of physical fear.

"It's all you ever do." His voice was soft, so quiet Nick wouldn't have heard him if he hadn't been whispering into his ear. "Why do you think I'm here? You'd rather hard-wire somebody else into your own head than risk disappointing some woman you just met."

When he tried to talk his voice sounded dim and distant. "We don't all sell ourselves to the highest bidder."

Kellogg chuckled and let up on him. A shiver ran through his entire body. "At least one of us is getting paid. What did you ever get from her?"

He pulled the folder to him with a scrabble of metal fingertips against the desk. Marty Bullfinch's folder--transcript of that last holotape, the note from the grasshopper, Marty's old tie clip holding it all together. "Friendship."

"Some friend, asking you to side with the people who threw you away like garbage."

"She hasn't asked that. You don't know that she will."

"Oh, she will. She'll ask and you'll go along with it, just like you always do. Want to know how I know that, Valentine?" Nick kept reading the name on the folder over and over, as if that would be enough to make it take hold. "It's because for somebody made of steel you're pretty damn spineless."

Marty Bullfinch. Marty Bullfinch. Ellie's handwriting, because his was terrible. Ellie. She told him something the other day that made him laugh. What was it?

"She's gonna turn into everything you hate and you're too much of a coward to do anything about it."

Something about a vacuum cleaner. Arturo had been disassembling one, trying to reverse engineer a junk jet one of the caravans had brought in.

"You're better off doing what he did. You know that, right? You can save yourself a hell of a lot of heartache if you put that pistol to your head and pull the trigger."

Kellogg's voice was so soft and so gentle that the words coming out made him dizzy. There was a disconnect between tone and meaning and... and... and he rested his forehead against the heel of the hand that couldn't feel and tried to think what she'd told him.

"You hear me?"

Clear as a bell he heard Ellie say, "If you clean out a vacuum cleaner, you become the vacuum cleaner."

He ground the heel of his hand into his forehead and got out a strained chuckle. He'd laughed 'til he cried when she told him that. Not physically--he wasn't set up to cry, couldn't, not really--but he cried just the same. It was the same awful joke Jenny would have told Nick Valentine, back before everything went fell apart.

"Valentine?"

It was funny. He'd laughed at the time. He couldn't right now, but sooner or later he would. He had to believe it would be alright again.

Kellogg sighed, so softly he almost missed it. "You can't ignore me forever, Valentine."

He laughed, and he could feel the tears he couldn't cry burn his eyes. "Watch me try."

For a long time there was silence. He thought of nothing as hard as he could.

Then Kellogg chuckled.

"Fine," he said. "You don't want to listen to me, that's fine. You always listened better to him anyway."

His throat--the throat he didn't have, he couldn't eat, couldn't cry--ached with tears, and when he raised his head it wasn't Kellogg leaning against the office wall, because Kellogg had never been there. His eyes met Nick Valentine's, and it was like looking in a mirror for a moment, before he remembered who he was and what he was. The heart he didn't have hurt.

"It's going to be okay," he said, even if he wasn't sure he believed it, but Nick turned away and curled in on himself. "I know you don't believe me, but it will be okay."

Nick shook his head. "It's going to pieces and nothing we can do will stop it."

He wanted to speak, to find something to say that would counter that, but there was nothing. The world was falling apart again, and there was nothing he or Nora or any single person could do to stop it.

"We can't fix it. All we can do is watch. And I don't want to watch anymore."

No tears, of course, but he could feel the anxiety in a tight knot in his chest. He put his head in his hands and tried to think. In the moment there'd been something funny, something that made him smile.

"What are we supposed to do?" Nick's voice seemed to catch painfully high in his throat. "Are we supposed to just sit and watch it happen again?"

"I know it's terrifying. It's a lot. But this isn't helping anyone."

"I don't care." It came out almost a scream and he flinched from the sound. "I don't care if it doesn't help. Nothing is going to help. Nothing is going to fix this."

So what was the alternative? Look away? Do nothing? Pretend they couldn't see what was happening?

"Don't tell me it's going to be okay. It's not. It's not and you know that."

He had to stop the words from tumbling from his lips. It's going to be okay. For years he'd been chanting them to himself, or some variation. You're going to be okay. You're okay. You're okay. To distract himself, something louder than the guns in his head. Maybe it was a lie. Maybe he wasn't okay.

Nick was crying. He could hear him crying, and if he could have he would have joined him. "I don't want to do this. And you know you don't want to do this either."

He was so right. Nick was right and he knew that. His hands were shaking--they weren't, that wasn't something he was built to do, but they shook just the same. "The time's events would seem mere chaos but all/Drift the one deadly direction."

Nick hiccuped and he heard him turn, and he turned as well. It was like looking into a mirror that would always be there to show him how badly it hurt.

"What?" Nick asked. His eyes were glassy with tears but his expression was confused and hurt. "What did you say?"

"'Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools.'"

Nick stared at him, his face screwed up with tears. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"It's... it's a poem. Hope is Not for the Wise. Robinson Jeffers."

Nick just looked at him as if he had lost his mind. A sob choked its way out through a laugh. "Fear is for fools, huh? Then we must be the biggest damn fools in the Commonwealth."

He laughed--did he laugh? how was it possible that the Institute gave him the power to laugh but not to cry?--and opened his arms. "Come here."

"What are you on about now?"

"Just come here."

Nick came to him and he wrapped him in his arms and in the grand scheme of things it meant nothing, really, but he was too tired and sad for anything else.

"Nobody's going to save us, you know," Nick said.

"I know. Nobody's going to take care of us but us."

"Nothing's going to change. It's not going to stop."

He'd thought--he'd hoped--this would help. He couldn't feel that a damn thing had changed.

"So why bother? Why watch it happen again?"

His gaze drifted to the gun, still just out of reach on the desk where he'd pushed it.

"It's not going to change a goddamn thing."

He could feel tears in his eyes and throat and heart, but they didn't fall and his eyes were clear when he looked down at Marty Bullfinch's file, still there on the table, still printed in Ellie's neat writing. "I know."

"Then why?" The noise Nick made could have been laughing or it could have been crying but he knew it was both. "What good is it to watch something you can't change?"

His head ached and his throat ached and he would have given anything to cry but he held Nick and he looked down at the penciled letters on the folder. "I gotta try."

"But what's the point? What's the fucking point, Valentine?"

He did want to die, he did, he wanted to put it all down and walk away, but he thought of Ellie and her printed letters and her terrible jokes and he couldn't leave her to face it all alone. "There's still things here worth saving. I can't give up on her." For a moment Nick was silent and he realized his mistake. "Them. I can't give up on them."

Nick chuckled wearily.

"You didn't get that from me," he said.

"You cold or something?" Ellie asked, closing the office door behind her.

He looked up at her, trying to get his bearings, trying to find it in him to speak. He looked down and saw he was only holding himself like he was trying to keep out the chill. There was no Nick Valentine. There was no Kellogg. There was just him. "Reflex, I guess."

She came over and pushed his gun back onto the desk from its precarious perch on the corner and set down a box that smelled of noodles and motor oil. "You're so weird, Nick."

He held himself and he looked at her. "Hey, Ellie?"

She took Marty Bullfinch's file and put it back in the cabinet. "Yeah?"

The words didn't come. He looked at her with the silence between them and he couldn't put into words how much he didn't want her to have to go through what Nick had gone through when he watched the world burn. She stood there for longer than she should have, and this time the words did come out. "It's going to be okay."

She didn't question him, didn't put her head on one side in confusion, didn't shake her head and turn away.

"Okay," she said, and nodded.

Okay.


End file.
